MALMO, SWEDEN.- Rooseum presents Saltuna - The Baltic Sea Experience, on view through July 17. The starting point for the exhibition Saltuna – The Baltic Sea Experience at Rooseum was a project that took place in 2002 on the Danish island of Bornholm, where a group of artists were invited with their families and friends to an old farmhouse called Saltuna for one week. For the first time the projcets have been gathered for a joint presentation and will be shown together with both works created in a more everyday studio situation and works that have been produced in Malmö for this exhibition. Rather than being based on a specific theme, the exhibition can point to the influence of specific circumstances and social relations on artistic production and emphazise the meaning of communities based on personal relations and mutual affiliations.

In 2002 the art publisher Christoph Keller (Revolver Books, Frankfurt-am-Main), invited seventeen artists to a ‘Holiday Grant for Artists’ at Saltuna. The outcome of the project was a series of small solo shows at Revolver’s exhibition space in Frankfurt-am-Main 2002-2003. All of the projects are small-scale and with a strong sense of spontaneity and playfulness matching the easy-going atmosphere of the place. Some took the form of simple works based on ad-hoc thinking and problem-solving, some are more like sketches or rudimentary ideas but they all allude to modest experiments with the notion of artistic activity.

The stay at Saltuna offered an opportunity for the artists to change their usual work methods, to reflect on their artistic positions and twist their work in other directions, which created a kind of shared experience visible within the projects produced during the visit. The exhibition includes works created under varied circumstances and for dissimilar ends. The intention is to show the diversity of artistic positions and draw attention to the individual approaches as well as to provide a link between work evolving out of specific situations and work produced under more everyday circumstances, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.

Touching upon a range of aspects concerning artistic practice the exhibition reflects upon how artistic work is organized, perceived and dealt with by artists, curators and institutions. Central to this is to consider how personal relations and social patterns influence the structures of art production and to emphasize these connections as an integral part of the art world and the way in which they constitute an important factor for the production, distribution and presentation of art. It is precisely through the multifaceted landscape of networks, communities and collaborative structures artists engage in that creative proposals for understanding and working with art are engendered which makes this a valuable field of exploration.

With Saltuna – The Baltic Sea Experience Rooseum wishes to address these issues and examine how to cultivate new and dynamic frameworks for art production. Insisting on the relevance of artistic practice in providing alternative models for the order of things and wishing to promote imaginative thinking about the conditions for art, we hope that the exhibition can inspire new thinking about habitual ways of making and doing in other areas.